Serverless Architectures - <AUTHOR> http://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html <comment><USER3> One of the bigger problems with serverless architecture (beyond catastrophic lack of good debugging and development tools) is the idea of managing multiple users, working on multiple code branches, and all needing environments that somewhat closely mirror production. This leaves servless as a decent way to hook an event callback to some AWS event (new file uploaded to S3, etc) but IMHO not anything that approximates any kind of business logic - or anything that will need to be iterated on by more than one developer. I feel it is a massive reach to market this to anyone at this point, and if this catches on, would really make me hate programming compared to what local development in VMs feels like - where I have much greater tools. It's inefficient both for the developer and at runtime.

<comment><USER4> First we need a common standard for the serverless pieces of code to talk to the app server and gateway... maybe we could call it a common gateway interface. Then maybe someone will write an apache module for it.

<comment><USER5> I laughed at the CGI reference, but TBH pub/sub + microservices feels really awesome and clean so far. Combined with DB as a service it's even better IMO.

<comment><USER6> I was thinking DBaaS as well, which is the part that's usually under- emphasized. NoSQL for specific tasks and (sharded if needed) relational with stored procedures for anything complex. When you think of Postgres as its own (heavily optimized) server, it changes the game. For most apps, at that point you just need a passthrough layer exposing endpoints, which is usually a dead simple nodejs app behind a balancer. The rest of the heavy logic is then offloaded to the client. This is why full-stack makes sense now more than ever. It's getting so easy there's almost no excuse anymore.

<comment><USER4> >This is why full-stack makes sense now more than ever. It's getting so easy there's almost no excuse anymore.

There's a plenty of good reasons to avoid SPAs.

<comment><USER6> I'd like to hear one. Server side rendering if/where needed, don't overload on NPM modules, drop jQuery entirely, react lib served by a CDN. SPAs fail in the hands of amatuers. They excel as a way of instituting rigor in dynamic site development when wielded by people who know what they're doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The vendor lock-in alone is enough to make BaaS dead on arrival. Some seem to lock you not only on specific platform APIs but also on a single programming language(i.e. javascript) like it wasn't worse enough to have a single language on the client.

<comment><USER8> Once you've written a bunch of code in a language, you're pretty much locked in - without a massive effort - in any event.

<comment><USER9> In almost all cases, there's a significant difference in the sort of risk that comes from B/FaaS dependencies and the sort of risk that comes from PL lock- in. The former leads to technology lock-in and _vendor lock-in_ , while the latter almost never[1] leads to vendor lock-in.

Technology lock-in without vendor lock-in isn't that huge of a liability. A popular PL under an appropriate license isn't going to disappear tomorrow, and its creator doesn't have the power to hold your business at gunpoint. Conversely, B/FaaS providers upon which you _truly_ depend definitely can extract (or by disappearing simply destroy) much more value than you originally anticipate.

[1] If you use Wolfram Language or Matlab then your choice of PL causes vendor lock-in, but most PLs aren't like this.

<comment><USER8> I agree - "vendor lock-in" seems like a valid point, although I don't know the details of many of these services. "Locked into a programming language" is something that will probably happen kind of naturally anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I truly hope that people stop misleading the mass with buzz words. We already have too many of them being used for clickbait. I don't get why a simple client-server architecture would not suffice the "serverless". Software engineering and architecture design used to be cool in the past with useful design patterns. Now it's full of tricks/buzz words that promise the users of silver bullets that help them to manage code and servers. In reality, no such silver bullet exist and such tricks/architecture fail every day. I've noticed that martinfowler.com is one such place that seems to provide such empty promise of a silver bullet!

<comment><USER11> I am reading about this trying to think what it could be useful for. (I am sure there are some, I don't see any use for it with my work).

"Serverless" seems to be the pricing model. It still runs on a server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm cautiously optimistic that the vendor lock-in will fade away over time. Hopefully open source frameworks can provide a jQuery-like abstraction layer over all of the vendor-specific implementation details. Of course, there are lots of challenges when you start getting into deeper architectures - <USER2> triggering layers of lambdas interacting with various caches and data stores. But I we'll see best practices emerge that help people keep things simple and flexible.

For testing it should be possible to run everything in a mock vendor system on your local machine - not that such a system exists today, but theoretically it could.

Overall, my sense is that Serverless architectures will never be useful for everyone. They'll always be better for smaller, simpler systems that don't see tons of traffic. The Serverless community should focus on these use cases. The thing is, there are tons and tons of apps that are over served by all the flexibility EC2 provides. And there is another set of unborn apps that haven't been created only because the barrier to setting up and managing the backend was a _little_ too high. I'm really excited to see serverless bring these apps to life.

<comment><USER7> I actually think the opposite. Serverless architectures are the future for most of the app servers that need a language agnostic API. Maybe I didn't get it right but to me BaaS is just a PaaS with a common API interface(i.e. authentication, input/output serialization, cache etc).

<comment><USER13> There's a pragmatic definition buried in the article... if you can't spin up your app in 20ms and run it for half a second effectively, it's PaaS, not serverless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> We used to have serverless architecture... it was called standalone desktop apps! No servers, no backend, no nothing, just you and the code. It was great!

<comment><USER15> It wasn't great. Updating apps was a huge pain, which meant that bugfixes were fewer and farther between. You couldn't sync preferences/settings between computers. Remember getting a new computer or wiping one? You knew you had hours of work ahead of you, just reconfiguring it. Did you write a shell script to do that for you? Too bad, it did something weird along the way, and now you have to spend hours figuring out what's wrong.

And don't even get me started on installing dependencies...

<comment><USER14> It honestly wasn't so much of a bother. Updates were really the only pain point but then programs received updates periodically at best. (Talking dial- up era here) The cost of distribution motivated developers to release much higher-quality code, relatively-speaking, as not doing so cost you more (in terms of disks+shipping, additional bandwidth, etc) and well as earned a much greater amount of ire from your users.

If you were smart you had a system for dealing with migrating between computers. Maybe it was a script, maybe you knew which folders to copy, maybe you were extra careful with where you saved everything. Maybe you didn't care.

Some of the modern shit is nice (I fondly</s> remember setting up a personal Active Directory+Exchange server to get a private LDAP sync, compared to Google now) but as a whole the current model encourages carelessness and mindless profiteering. There's too much of the equation nowadays in control of people who want to charge you for it, whereas before the user was had control. I miss the days when it was considered rude to require a network connection unnecessarily.

Plus, nowadays a product you love can turn to mush and there's nothing you can do about it save stop paying for it (and lose its services in the process), which will never amount to anything unless people do it en mass. Features regularly disappear because some bullshit business reason or another, or some user metric said only 2% of people used it. Well, fuck those 2% guys right?!? Before, if I didn't like your patch I could just revert to the old install discs. Nowadays I have to pray you don't alter your deal further.

edit: and don't get me wrong, as a developer the evergreen model is great. But as a power user, I hate it.

edit2: not to say older software didn't have its crap. Lots of fussy stuff to deal with. But compare the initial release of Windows 3.1 to Windows 10...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's a big difference between Paas, where you hand over control of your backend. Compared to Faas, where you just outsource a small part of your infrastructure.

FaaS solutions like algolia, getsentry, getstream.io. mapbox, layer, keen.io, twilio, stripe etc only run a small part of your application. They scale well, are more reliable and often more cost-effective than an in-house solution. If you're ever not happy with them it's easy to switch to an alternative. If Algolia no longer works for you, simply switch to Elastic. If you're not happy with Mapbox, use google maps. No longer like, getstream.io, use Stream- Framework. It's relatively easy to change since you're not handing over your entire backend.

Also see my post on HighScalability about this: [http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/12/22/scalability- as-a-...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/12/22/scalability-as-a- service.html)

<comment><USER17> Twilio, Stripe, etc. aren't what the article is referring to as FaaS (which, incidentally, I've never heard of outside this article but seems pretty descriptive). They're talking about things like Amazon Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Parse Cloud Code, where you _write code_ that runs on a third- party service. The entry & exit points of the code are under the control of hosting provider, which distinguishes it from PaaS, where they normally take a well-known platform that'd work fine on your laptop and then perform hosting and administration.

Think of it as the API vs SPI distinction that we used to have back in Windows-land. API-only services like Twilio or Stripe are usually just called SaaS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Would have liked to see some real cost analysis, other than it should save you money, because that is only true if scale is small to medium.

That's the thing, I guess the demographic that lambada is going for it will save money, but along with the mentioned vendor lock in, when you really need to have something on and processing requests non stop the costs savings really evaporate.

It's weird to me that the serverless thing catches on when it seems to be best suited for projects in their infancy without need for 24/7 request processing , or things out of the critical path like image resizing or things of this nature. But entire apps? Feels very much like going back in time to shared hosting.

I could see it saving money until about 1m requests a day and then a sharp drop off where you are hemorrhaging cash after that...

With modern auto scaling systems that aws and gce provide I bet most shops don't stand to save any more money than with a normal modern day refactor.

At the end of the day this leaves you more rope to hang yourself with. It makes it easier to run slow or poorly thought out code. 1000 processes might be cool but is never as cheap as 2 working correctly that accomplish the same thing, as an extreme but actual example of a situation I helped unwind with GAE, which was serverless before the buzzword.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm early adopter of serverless applications, few weeks ago was released a tool that make manage our Amazon lambda applications even easy.

[https://github.com/jorgebastida/gordon](https://github.com/jorgebastida/gordon)

A few examples can be found here, and it's a good point to start if you're using Aws Lambda

[https://github.com/jorgebastida/gordon/tree/master/examples](https://github.com/jorgebastida/gordon/tree/master/examples)

</comment><comment><USER20> It's sometimes okay to use inexact or uninformative terminology, but it becomes a problem when words are used to mean their exact opposite. So if you are going to talk about serverful programs - those which depend on servers and can't operate without them – that's fine, but please use some term other than 'serverless'.

</comment><comment><USER21> Aren't 'serverless' PAASs just a reinvention of PHP hosting?

<comment><USER22> Adrian Cockcroft: "If your PaaS can efficiently start instances in 20ms that run for half a second, then call it serverless."

[https://twitter.com/adrianco/status/736553530689998848](https://twitter.com/adrianco/status/736553530689998848)

<comment><USER23> No, call them extremely fast lifcycle servers.

<comment><USER22> That's a lot more syllables than "serverless".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> We're currently exploring lambda for certain applications as well. My coworker wrote up a nice little post about it:

[https://product.reverb.com/2016/07/16/deploying-lambdas- with...](https://product.reverb.com/2016/07/16/deploying-lambdas- with-s3-jenkins-and-gulp/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11921208](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11921208)

</comment><comment><USER26> Previous (recent) discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11921208](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11921208)

<comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this link: [http://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html#drawbacks](http://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html#drawbacks) with the title "Serverless Drawbacks", as that was the recently added section. Guess someone changed it, but it's not a dupe :)

In any case, it seems that "Benefits" has also been added since the last HN discussion (revision history: [http://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html#Significant...](http://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html#SignificantRevisions)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> For my first serverless project, I built a service that manages an advertising account, by analysing ads and optimising the spend spread for a configured goal. I was surprised to find that one of the most difficult aspects, was in throttling outgoing API requests. Basically, I needed to avoid abusing a 3rd party service by hammering it with parallel or rapid fire requests.

I discovered all kinds of weird solutions:

\- Push a "please wait" message onto an SQS queue, and set a Cloud watch alarm to fire when the queue length was >= 1 for at least one second. Have a variety of lambdas respond to the alert by checking if the have any work to do, and then racing to pop the queue and do one operation. I think I needed SNS in there too, for some reason. Fanout?

\- Build a town clock on an EC2 and have it post "admit one" tokens to SNS. Nice and simple, but I was evaluating serverless, and adding a server felt like defeat. Might as well just run the whole thing on that EC2.

\- Have on lambda pop request descriptions from a queue, and sleep for one second after sending each one. The request responses would have been pushed onto another queue. All of the other lambdas could just handle the events they cared about as quickly as data became available. Sleeping in a lambda just felt wrong, but for one second, it probably would have been fine.

In the end, I was still experimenting and exploring when my estimate loomed near, so I just wrapped up all of the application code and piped it all together with delays in loops that made API requests. Deployed it to Heroku in a hurry with minimal fuss.

What I learned:

\- There are bad use cases for serverless, and I had started on one (SLS doesn't wait on no one)

\- Serverless does encourage a clean architecture, from a code perspective: I was able to quickly transform it into a completely different type of application.

\- AWS's services have lots of little surprises in their feature set: SQS doesn't fire any kind of event. SNS can't schedule events in the future (maybe I should have expected that one). Cloud watch events can only trigger a single lambda.

\- There is a need for a town clock / scheduler as a service in AWS'. How many people have built that themselves?

<comment><USER28> > "\- Push a "please wait" message onto an SQS queue, and set a Cloud watch > alarm to fire when the queue length was >= 1 for at least one second. Have a > variety of lambdas respond to the alert by checking if the have any work to > do, and then racing to pop the queue and do one operation. I think I needed > SNS in there too, for some reason. Fanout?"

Did you want AWS Kinesis? The integration with Lambda polls the queue every few seconds and sends batches of records to a Lambda function when the queue has work to do. [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/with- kinesis.htm...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/with-kinesis.html)

When you evaluate the AWS serverless platform, I recommend looking at everything that is an event source, sink, or processor: Lambda, SNS, SQS, SWF, SES, Cognito, IAM, Kinesis, IoT, API Gateway, S3, DynamoDB.

It's a pretty rich palette to work with.

<comment><USER27> I did look at Kinesis too, but for my use case, it didn't really help much over SQS. There is still no way to put a Kinesis event "in the future" so that I won't see it for a second, and I would have had to set the batch size to 1, if I was using Kinesis as a means to throttle an activity.

In the spirit of treating this like Lego, I suppose that maybe I could have uses SES to email itself an HTTP request description, and counted on the email lag to keep requests spread out over time. But at this point, things are getting so weird that I think it's time to just admit that "work on something at a specific pace, then go to sleep for a few hours" isn't the sort of task that the serverless architecture is well suited for. Serverless is for tasks that you want done on demand, as quickly as possible, imo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sort of related, I've implemented a GitHub pages based serverless app demo, that uses GitHub API to execute git operations from the browser. Though slightly weird, I really enjoyed this experiment, and think there might be something to this concept.

[https://github.com/idoco/GitMap](https://github.com/idoco/GitMap)

</comment><comment><USER30> I expected the article to be about the goodness of some peer-to-peer architecture that doesn't require central servers, not a twisted definition of cloud computing.

</comment><comment><USER31> One of the big issues here that is only very very slightly glossed over is the security you give up. The only sort of security filtering you get is AWS' WAF, which is considerably weaker than a firewall like mod_security with a default ruleset, or even apache's .htaccess. Inbound filtering, you're limited to a tiny ruleset with only a few conditions, and outbound filtering doesn't exist at all.

This lack of firewalling continues up and down the stack. As such, it's a lot harder to create rules regarding any API calls you make to third party services, harder to audit how your app interacts with any datastores, and generally an administrative nightmare. It may be useful for some apps, but just feels like a nightmare to maintain for any decently sized setup.

<comment><USER32> The sales pitch is that the fabric vendor does the administration, and people like you are out of a job.

Because the framework infrastructure is supposed to solve all of that behind the curtains, so developers cannot shoot themselves in the foot. (Other than through excessive resource consumption)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> "Serverless" WTF? I thought it would be a cool article on peer to peer mobile apps that don't rely on a backend server, something I think will be very popular in future for a variety of reasons.

Please, let's not accept this redefinition of a fundamental and well known term.

</comment><comment><USER34> I recently evaluated these, and I'm dying to use something like this. I would really love to be able to do this with sandboxed apps written in arbitrary languages like Go, Haskell, Rust, or even C++. Ideally, I wouldn't be managing docker containers or VMs to get certain jobs done.

Unfortunately, it's limited to JavaScript, Python, and Java for now. Google Cloud Functions is similarly limited to JavaScript.

I know that these languages were chosen because they can be easily sandboxed, but it would be nice to support something more generic without having to create docker containers for everything.

<comment><USER35> Have you checked out [https://github.com/iron- io/lambda](https://github.com/iron-io/lambda). Their is a tool for docker container creation, and also AWS Lambda compatibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> So apparently "serverless" means you don't have to requisition a cloud instance to run the service.

I remember this movie the first time around, when it was called "virtual hosting". What a revolution -- transitioning from needing a Unix box running Apache to run your PHP e-commerce site to having your host take care of that for you -- and everybody else.

Just because you're doing something old "in the cloud" now doesn't make it a new thing. Just like you can't append "...with a computer" to an existing method and get something patentable.

<comment><USER37> Does it matter whether something is new or not? The fact is there are services such as AWS lambda that people are using and talking about, so we need terminology for that.

<comment><USER36> Not really, as long as it's useful. But call it what it is -- hosted services. Don't make up a new, nonsensical name.

<comment><USER37> Hosted services doesn't really differentiate what they are. DynamoDB is a hosted service. So is EC2 and ECS.

<comment><USER36> Then call it function hosting or business-logic hosting. "Serverless" means "there is no server" which is demonstrably false. Or should I assume that words don't mean things?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The main point of serverless is cost - it is not just "Reduced operational cost" but orders of magnitude difference if one were to build cloud solutions that can scale the the same level and pay for cloud infrastructure (even if not used at minimum something must be running ...), monitoring, and people effort involved on ongoing basis (real cost)

Compare to working with level of abstraction of "entity" (function, could be bigger) and have it running when needed and scale as needed.

</comment><comment><USER39> One big challenge is the expense that is otherwise avoided via usage of connection pooling. Without the hack to keep the backing containers alive, tearing down and restarting them is expensive and wipes out all hot path optimizations made by JIT compilers besides having to reestablish connections and pay the handshake prices. Apart from the simplest of use-cases at this time, imho this is not an efficient model if sustained performance and low latency are of interest.

<comment><USER40> I've been wondering this same thing. We use gunicorn to handle our web requests and it pre-loads our code so it's ready at the drop of a hat to serve a request. It takes a few seconds to load up our site, so wouldn't Lambda have to pay that cost with every web request?

I've been going under the assumption that it's just not the right use case for Lambda, though I'm hoping I'm wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I wanted a good tutorial/walkthrough on this topic.

Has anyone gone through [https://pragprog.com/book/brapps/serverless-single- page-apps](https://pragprog.com/book/brapps/serverless-single-page-apps)?

The example material looks good. Overall it could be a bit short.

</comment><comment><USER42> What a ridiculous and strange definition this is.

Its an architecture that relies on multiple, supposedly distributed services, all of which are hosted on servers...

Why not just call it "Multiserver" instead.

If they mean "containerless servers" or "microservices", then why don't they say so?

If they mean "distributed servers" why not call it that.

If they mean that the client relies on multiple services (each hosted on different servers) why not just call it a thick/fat/stateful client?

Even a database is a remote service (if not embedded), that is run on some sort of server.

Calling anything serverless is just ridiculous as long as it depends on services on the network.

This smells really bad of just another attempt at marketing a pointless definition just to get more business.

<comment><USER43> No, the idea is simple - the servers are invisible to the user, he doesn't know what or how many are in use.

Since the servers are completely abstracted away, they could have just as well not be - hence serverless.

An analogy escapes me but I sure there are some.

<comment><USER42> So it is about how the user _perceives_ the application?! If so, why is it called "an architecture"?

Or do you mean that the user don't have to care on how to _configure_ the application? Then "Zero-configuration" is a better name.

Or do you mean that the application _hides_ that it use services on the net? Then it is even worse.

<comment><USER44> > _So it is about how the user perceives the application_

The user here is the developer. Here's an explanation from the article:

> _" some amount of server-side logic is still written by the application > developer but unlike traditional architectures is run in stateless compute > containers that are event-triggered, ephemeral (may only last for one > invocation), and fully managed by a 3rd party ... One way to think of this > is __Functions as a Service. "_

FaaS is probably a better name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> There is google's appscript(based on javascript), which could also be termed as serverless. So ingenious for individual purposes, I have used it as a database(with google spreadsheet), scraping and saving 1000's of html/xml, deploying and demoing bootstrap websites. It also has a time limit of 5mins 30 seconds which could be overcome by controlling triggers or by using patt0's CBL [http://patt0.blogspot.in/2014/08/continuous-batch-library- up...](http://patt0.blogspot.in/2014/08/continuous-batch-library-update- for.html).

</comment><comment><USER46> Aren't we kind of already there (serverless)?

A lot of web frameworks enforce the shared-not-that-much (not quire "shared nothing", but close) style of programming where every HTTP request is essentially just an "event" that hooks into a controller-handler? And if you want anything to stick around from one request to the next, you keep it in memcache/db/BaaS/third-party service, not your own process?

I don't think this is as radical a shift as many here might think, especially given the move to containers is already well underway.

<comment><USER11> Kind of like "schemaless".

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I think a major problem with Serverless architecture, as much as it is awesome, is that to manage it you would need to be already familiar with the underlying systems that provide it. Hence, it would imperative that you already have worked with the architecture you are planning on replacing.

Unless there is some elegant factor to Serverless that I am missing. I just can't shake the feeling that at the end of the day this is just a sales tactic.

Nevertheless, I opt to use serverless BaaS solutions whenever I can afford to.

</comment><comment><USER48> Why is it called serverless if it uses Amazon Lambda instances?

<comment><USER32> Because you, the developer, do not buy or pay for "servers," only ephemeral "code invocations."

<comment><USER48> Sweet! So by that logic, all static sites are serverless because I pay for "file hosting" right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Serverless sounds like CGI evolved past needing a server anymore.

Oh yeah and remember spawning CGI processes for every request never scaled well. :-)

<comment><USER50> Lambda does keep processes running and reused between requests if they're coming quickly. You do, however, only get to handle one request at a time which is not the norm with node backends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> One issue people are talking about is vendor lock-in. I would like to note that this drawback is only valid for non-prototype software. For prototypes, hackathons, or "one time use" websites, these BaaS tools (such as Firebase) are essential.

Here is a case study: Last year I was working on an SMS app, QKSMS [1]. We offered a premium version for $2. We did a promotion on reddit where we gave away 10k free premium versions. So, take a second and ask yourself: how quickly do you think you could implement a promo code system + a website for distributing codes for one time use?

We did it in about 5 hours. It costed about $100. The website was (and still is) statically hosted on Github. [2] The website source code is ~22 lines of JavaScript. It pulled 12 promo codes from Firebase; and when a promo code was removed, it would (in realtime!) collapse it from the list and display a new promo code at the bottom.

The mobile app code was also very simple. First, check if the promo code is available (one API call); if so, enable premium and remove the code (another API call).

The reason why it costed about $100 is because we had too many concurrent users: the Firebase free plan allows only 50 concurrent users, and at our peak we were seeing ~500. Since the promo was only for a day, we bought an expensive plan that got pro-rated for just that day.

It was an extremely successful promotion. [3] The final result was very interactive. It was amazing to watch the codes disappear in real-time. It was like a game: you had to be fast to enter the code, because the codes were being used so quickly.

All in all, I believe we made more money in people buying it anyways (despite the promotion) than it costed to serve it. And keep in mind we built the _entire system_ in about 5 hours. And I'm not even a web developer. An actual web developer could have implemented this in an hour or two.

For reference here is the entire JavaScript powering the promo code website:

        var all_codes = new Firebase("https://qksms-promo.firebaseio.com/public_codes");
        all_codes.on('value', function(data){
          $('#remaining').text(data.numChildren());
          if (data.numChildren() === 0) {
            $('#status').text('No more codes!');
          }
        })

        all_codes.orderByValue().limitToFirst(12).on('child_added', function(data){
          $('#status').remove();

          var str = '<div class="code" id="';
          str = str.concat(data.key());
          str = str.concat('">');
          str = str.concat(data.key());
          str = str.concat('</div>');
          $('#wrapper').append(str);
          $('#'.concat(data.key())).hide().fadeIn(300);
        });

        all_codes.orderByValue().limitToFirst(12).on('child_removed', function(data){
          $('#'.concat(data.key())).slideUp(300, function(){
            $(this).remove();
          });
        });

[1] [https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms](https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms)

[2] [http://qklabs.com/qksms-promo/](http://qklabs.com/qksms-promo/)

[3] [https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/36eix7/dev_a_year_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/36eix7/dev_a_year_ago_today_i_showed_you_qksms_the/)

<comment><USER52> We got around 15,000 downloads that day (compared to the usual 300-500), and 10% converted to paid users

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> If successful this could lead reduction in developers needed in companies that use say AWS lambda.

<comment><USER54> > If successful this could lead reduction in developers needed in companies > that use say AWS lambda.

How so ? to me it makes development even more complicated, cheaper relative to hosting fees maybe, but simpler ? I don't think so. What if I want to use language XYZ not supported by lambda ?

<comment><USER55> > cheaper relative to hosting fees maybe

Currently serverless is more expensive in the average case from what I gather, mainly since it's new and there's little competition.

<comment><USER56> If avg case is that you stay within an average load for long periods of time, then it'll likely be more expensive (given a certain floor of actual load - for in-dev apps its dirt cheap - you won't have many servers running doing nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> How is this different then something like Heroku and their add-on ecosystem?

<comment><USER58> Heroku gives you servers, but manages them for you - so you have long running processes, for web or worker etc. Lambda allows you to have the process run for literally the lifecycle of the job (request, streaming job etc.). In fact, your job can't run for more than a few seconds or it is terminated. Heroku charges you for the hours your dynos run - but what if they're idle most of the time? You still pay for them - not with lambda.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> It doesn't seem the author knows how network programming works. This is all high level abstraction and diagrams, but no simple comparison of what are the pro/cons, what are the constraints, etc.

</comment><comment><USER60> Also see "Unhosted web apps": [https://unhosted.org/](https://unhosted.org/)

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm using the following setup for one of my sites:

Client -> post -> API Gateway -> AWS Lambda -> upload JSON to S3

Client -> get -> S3

Works pretty good!

<comment><USER7> Is it cost effective? I mean roughly.

<comment><USER62> Very very cheap, as long as you're writing your lambdas as performant as possible we've costed our app at ~2c / user / month with heavy api / database / lambda usage

<comment><USER7> It seems you are estimating the costs per user. I think an estimation per request and perhaps compared with raw EC2 servers would make more sense. Anyway, it's encouraging to hear that's cost effective. My experience with managed/ server-less platforms is quite bad in terms of costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> What if the web had the equivalent of 900 numbers. Something like http900://foo.bar.com

</comment><comment><USER64> If you're looking for an open-source API Gateway (less lock-in) with Lambda Integration then Kong ([https://github.com/Mashape/kong](https://github.com/Mashape/kong)) could be a useful complementary tool for your serverless architecture.

<comment><USER58> I think you're missing the point of the 'serverless' part, as Kong still requires you to have a dedicated server to run it. One of the early stage benefits of the serverless architecture and AWS's api gateway is that you don't have to pay for resources that you don't consume - so if you've only got a small amount of customers, you don't have to pay for dedicated instances to be running.

<comment><USER64> imho serverless architecture doesn't mean that your app is without servers 100%. Backend still serverless, but everything on top (like an API gateway, load balancer, service discovery, etc) can have dedicated resources.

<comment><USER58> Fair enough - there are definitely use cases where I could see that making sense. I love the value lambda provides for early stage, when every penny counts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> The main problem I see here is the problem we run into with every hot new abstraction of a thing that some people find troublesome as developers.

Someone already mentioned virtual hosting. I'd like to bring up ORMs. There's this idea that you can forget about the datastore--abstract it away, manage it in code, whatever. You don't have to learn about databases, table structures, or SQL if you don't want to. Just think about your models and don't worry about the rest.

I'm not against ORMS and find them both amazing and useful in certain ways. What I am against are systems developed entirely by developers who refuse to think about these things. Especially when I have to come into the situation after they have left and do something genuinely unforeseeable, like provide reporting and analytics from the back end, integrate with a third-party system, or--god forbid--add new functionality.

What you're left with is a dysfunctional, _slow_ , mess that's incredibly difficult to work with, a data layer that makes no sense unless you're working with that particular ORM, and no ability to tell exactly where in a quarter- million lines of code the exact logic you want to fix or modify actually is.

Yes, I'm quite certain that no one would recommend that anyone use serverless architecture that way. It's the wrong tool for the job. Just like ORMs are the wrong tool when performance is critical and you need to manage complexity for 30 services from the same data layer.

But someone is going to do it. In reality, probably lots of people will. Some CTOs will buy into the hype and hire teams of consultants to do it or hire their actual dev team full of serverless experts.

I'd echo what someone else said to the effect of abstractions are great so long as you understand what you're abstracting and know when it's a good idea to do so.

Viewed as a tool for accomplishing a small thing pretty quickly, it sounds cheap, fun, and exciting.

Viewed as a new way of taking shortcuts around quality infrastructure that's needed to support large, complex systems, I feel like it's probably a bad idea.

Given my attitudes above, it's probably not a surprise that I find the description a bit sketchy. I think calling it Serverless is a misnomer for all of the many good reasons people have pointed out in this thread. But I also question calling it architecture.

What I expect we will see in fairly short order is a collection of libraries or frameworks that resemble PhP not only in function (a service that pops in and out of existence on demand) but also a language-like form that evolves rather than being intentionally built--and evolves towards ease-of-beginner use rather than being guided by a coherent architecture.

And, in the grand scheme of things, that's fine with me. I just hope I never inherit a system like that.

<comment><USER11> This seems to be true for a lot of "new" tech.

I honestly think people should learn to build standard apps the standard way - (SQL) database, application layer, html / view layer -then learn to scale the parts as needed. Its well understood. There are good frameworks and tools available and plenty of historical examples of how to do things.

Everyone seems to want to jump on the shiny new way of doing things as soon as they come out. I often ask peoples reason for choosing their architecture - "thats how we do things these days" or "relational databases don't scale" seem to be the standard answers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Dangers of Pokemon Go [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2KXVfnw4rg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2KXVfnw4rg)</comment>


What is the most hygienic way to dry your hands? - <AUTHOR> http://theconversation.com/whats-the-most-hygienic-way-to-dry-your-hands-54196 <comment><USER2> front of my shirt, or failing that, my pants.</comment>


European universities dismal at reporting results of clinical trials - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01389-y <comment><USER3> US universities are also pretty bad: [https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/09/20/re...](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/09/20/reporting- clinical-trials), although Europe seems to be doing a worse job at complying with mandatory reporting in general.

Funnily enough, everyone with 100% compliance is a Big Pharma company, while everyone with 0% compliance is an academic university.

<comment><USER4> Academia is about ego, not being correct.

If you are getting a PhD, you prove what your professor tells you.

It seems every time I read a published study, the data is unusable, but they claim an extremely specific outcome.

My curiosity, why does the peer review process let this go?

<comment><USER5> If you are getting a PhD, chances are you or your professor applied for and received funding for a specific research project - and that's what you research. Obviously an advisor will guide you towards doing work they can advise on, as is their role...

At the end of the project, results are expected and reported. Broad significant outcomes are unlikely without lots of clean data, so the trend is towards narrow-but-significant outcomes.

Reporting is biased against publishing insignificant outcomes... that's a valid criticism. Peer-reviewed publication is a lot of work to announce "we found nothing". However, that is not a valid critique of peer review - <USER2> null results are thoroughly vetted.

Despite flaws, peer reviewed science is still clearly superior to commercial research - which suppressed climate change, smoking cancer, and the effects of lead air pollution for decades.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's starting to seem like we agressively discuss a lot of proposed European rules here on HN. But, when they come into effect they're immediately ignored by the people who should be complying and the people who should be enforcing.

<comment><USER7> In this instance it might be because there are is no penalty for running afoul of the obligations:

> Updated laws on clinical trials that are not expected to become legally > binding until 2020 specify that there should be penalties for institutions > that don't comply with the rules.

If following the rules was a mandatory requirement for further funding for the same institution, I am sure they would update their internal policies in an eyeblink.

<comment><USER8> Same with gdpr, it was on the rolls since 2016(?)

<comment><USER9> I've been (naively?) surprised at how many websites clearly break the GDPR rules we've been wringing our hand over on HN for the past months.

<comment><USER10> GDPR is imposed regularly, see [1] for an early account. Or do you mean something else?

[1] [https://www.gdprtoday.org/gdpr-in- numbers/](https://www.gdprtoday.org/gdpr-in-numbers/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> An interesting read on the effects of FDA trial registration requirements and publication bias: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6199729/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6199729/)

</comment><comment><USER12> How many of these studies are conducted in English vs. the legacy local language?

<comment><USER13> Languages other than English are considered legacy now?

<comment><USER12> For Academia, yes. All of the scientific articles are written in that language.

The youngest generations are hugely influenced by Youtube and the internet, and many speak English more fluently than their own legacy local language.

This is a great thing for humanity. A common language will ease the flow of ideas and simplify commerce.

<comment><USER14> And destroy a great deal of culture. No thanks.

<comment><USER12> Culture is not language, it is the people. Why do people defend language, which can be recorded, yet are silent on the significantly below-replacement fertility rates of some European populations, and the high levels of immigration that will eventually replace the native 'cultures'?

<comment><USER15> > Culture is not language, it is the people.

No, culture is not people, it is the shared behaviors and values of the people; use of a particular language is part of that. Immigration may threaten that (since the immigrants do bring their own culture), but immigrants often assimilate into the host culture, or at least adopt large portions of it.

Culture is _not_ genetic heritage.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


My project: Twitterate: Rate stuff via Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://twitterate.com

<comment><USER2> I implemented a similar idea a few weeks ago and called it <http://www.tweviews.com> I like your implementation: the RSS feed and the grouping of items being rated into the Hot Stuff category are both cool.

My set-up is similar: reply tweets sent to @tweviews However, I send them on as normal tweets to the tweviews Twitter account. This means that if people want tweviews, they can just follow the Twitter account.

Content-wise, I was shooting for a different slant: I also have a cron-job set up that pulls in the reply tweets, but I moderate them and only send on the good ones.

I'm still tweaking the format of the tweviews. Currently, it is "@tweviews thing, artist ... review" I display the latest five tweets in a sidebar on my blog (link in my profile) and automatically link the "thing, artist" part up to a Google search.

Anyway, in summary, I really like Twitterate. Nice job.

<comment><AUTHOR> Moderation,reposting to Twitter, and linking are interesting ideas -- I hope you don't mind if I take them as suggestions and potentially implement them down the road.

What language/framework did you use to build tweviews?

<comment><USER2> Please do!

I haven't got much time to work on Tweviews at the moment - I did it as a little diversionary side-project-burst-of-creation thing. My main focus at the moment is my start-up.

I also used Ruby/Rails. I find projects like this to be both ideally suited to, and hampered by, the use of RoR. They're nice and quick to code, but setting up the hosting environment is a time-consuming bore.

<comment><USER3> You two should work together, maybe. It's usually pretty hard to say, 'hey I need a co founder' when there isn't even a shared interest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think you've stumbled onto something genuinely interesting: twitter's users are the kind of verbose early adopter that write reviews, and you're using an interface they're already familiar with. Furthermore, if I understand twitter correctly (not a user), you've got a viral spread mechanism built in, in that all followers of twitterate users will see the @rating and wonder what it means (though it would help you if the tag was @twitterate).

If you're interested in pursuing that, you should rewrite twitterate.com as a destination site for people looking for ratings. It'll be depressingly bad now, but it will expose what you need to do to make it work. Or you could leave it as the entertaining toy it is. Good work in any case!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Gentlemen: I give you the Internet's first and only way to rate things on a 1 to 5 scale.

To use, just send a tweet reply to @rating in this form:

"@rating 5 "Thing Being Rated" and some comments here"

This is a pretty rough draft -- wish I could say it was a weekend project but it took a few weekends; but it was fun and I learned a lot about Rails, and Rails deployment especially.

So, here's the releasing early part. Should I iterate or abandon? What features would make this cool?

Note: the part of the app that scrapes Twitter is an hourly cron job, so if you don't see your rating immediately, that's why.

<comment><USER5> It's cute. A fine beginner Rails project.

First thing I wish for, 5 seconds after hitting this page: links. I want the thing being rated to be a link that I can click on. Try detecting URLs, and/or using Google's mighty I'm Feeling Lucky function.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> awesome! congrats

I vote iterate. I think some sweet real time graphs and charts would be cool. but i like the simple look also.

One suggestion: Speed up the cron, i need instant gratification

<comment><USER7> You could also replace the cron job with a Jabber client to receive the @rating messages.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's interesting -- I didn't know Twitter supported that; I'll definitely check that out and implement it once I grok it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great job! Nice and simple.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great idea, jraines</comment>


My Visual Resume - <AUTHOR> http://www.ajaimk.com/blog/2009/7/3/my-visual-resume.html

<comment><USER2> Ajai, I really like the idea of creating a resume based on the Toyota Production System A3 report (<http://www.coe.montana.edu/IE/faculty/sobek/A3/report.htm>). I'm not sure if that's what you meant to do, but the idea certainly is striking.

Specific comments, clockwise from the top left:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

The chart of effort over time

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

* The axes are unlabeled, which makes for an unclear chart. Although it seems that the horizontal axis is time, I don't know what the vertical axis is; the name of the chart implies that the vertical axis is "effort", but I'm not sure how to read that (eg, what are the units of effort that you are using here?)

* The third dimension of the chart clearly does not add any informational value, and in my opinion does not add any aesthetic value.

* The grid lines make the words inside the chart harder to read, and do not contribute to an easier understanding of the data.

* I think you were going for a stacked area chart, which would be a pretty good choice for this, but I would clean it up: drop the third dimension, remove the grid lines, clarify the axes and units.

* The scattering of achievements underneath the chart use colors in the stars that match colors in the chart above, but do not seem to have any real connection to the information in the chart. In addition, I think the achievements would be more powerful presented in a separate timeline chart.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

The chart of drivers

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

* The meters are a little dark, and hard to read.

* The numbers on each meter go up to 100, which seems to imply a percentage. Ie, 40% driven by money, 70% driven by coffee. But, since the numbers don't total to 100%, my interpretation is wrong, or the chart is misleading. Either way, the meaning of the numbers you are using should be cleared up: what are the units, and what is the relation between the different meters?

* The chart also implies that deadlines are more effective at driving you than money is, which makes me think that if I give you a lot of deadlines, I don't have to pay you very much. Is this your intent?

* Overall, I think the use of meters here does not do well to communicate what I think you are trying to get across: that you are driven by interest in the material, by the importance of delivering a product, and only then by the money. I get that, but it takes awhile to unpack the meaning.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

The tag cloud

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

* This is essentially just a bunch of words of various sizes. On a website, I can see the purpose: indicating the relative appearance of the words in twitter posts, or in tags used to describe a set of blog posts, etc. In this context, I think you're trying to communicate the relative strength of your interests on various topics. Not a bad idea. I'd make the difference between the sizes of the words a little stronger, make the big ones bigger, and the small ones smaller. Right now, they are all sort of the same size. The things you want to make more prominent should be really obvious.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

The chart of desired careers

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

* I don't know what information the colors are supposed to communicate to me. Maybe you just wanted to use some color in the chart, but it seems like the colors want to be telling me something. But there is no key to the colors, so I end up confused as to the purpose of the colors.

* No units on the chart. Maybe this is, again, a relative measure of your desire. If so, that needs to be a little clearer. At any rate, should I be reading this as your desire for a career in coding is 1/9th your desire for a career in entrepreneurship?

* That's a lot of space taken up to tell me not a whole lot of information.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

The binder clipped note

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

* Is this telling me that your resume is licensed under the creative commons, or something else? I am not at all clear what this block is trying to tell me.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

The yellow sticky note

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

* No notes here. The information is clear.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

The chart of skills in various categories

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

* The categories are never named, leaving the reader to infer the categories from the items in each pie chart. You should list the categories over each pie chart.

* The last pie chart doesn't make any sense to me. Pie charts are for showing relative values between multiple things. A pie chart with 100% of something doesn't tell me anything, unless there is a list of other things that are not in the pie chart. Like, 100% on people and networking skills, 0% on animal training skills, 0% on sewing and crocheting skills. Otherwise, what does that pie chart communicate?

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

Conclusion

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

Overall, I think the idea is very smart. A3 reports are a great way to communicate a lot of complicated and important information in a confined space, forcing the report writer to analyze and summarize for the benefit of other people.

I'm far less concerned than other people as to the beauty of this resume; A3 reports are not known for their aesthetic merits, and I've seen a lot of ugly but invaluable A3 reports.

This is a solid start, but it needs a lot of work to clean it up, emphasize the important information, and remove the unnecessary graphical cruft. The chart in the upper left (effort over time) is a good anchor for the rest of the resume; cleaned up and simplified, it could be a powerful and clear way to represent your work over the last few years.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot Sean. Wow. You sure did put a lot of time on this. It was indeed the most helpful one of the lot and I agree with most of your observations if not all. The next one should look better.

<comment><USER2> It was time well spent if I could help a fellow HackerNewsian.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> As a hiring manager, I can honestly say if that crossed my desk I would probably pitch it. Way too busy and takes too much time to get the desired info out of it, especially for someone who claims "UI Design".

I will also tell you from my own experience, that I'm a more than a tad hesitant about college students and recent graduates who are heavy-handed with the "CEO, co-founder, and entrepreneur" titles and interests on their resumes. Not to be too harsh, but since when does a "society", which in most cases is just a loose grouping of people with similar interests, have or need a "CEO".

Get some actual experience under your belt and list some bona-fide measurable accomplishments on your resume (this is generic advice, not just targeted at you). There are many people who are legends in their own mind, but if you list bottom-line things you have actually done, that will come through on your resume. There is no benefit, IMO, to over-hyping glorified titles.

Much of the data on here tells me very little. You appear to have more OSX skills than linux skills, but relative to what? Linus Torvalds, or my grandmother?

I'm not 100% sure, but it looks like over the same period of time you put as much effort into "Firewall" as you did "classes". Were you a slacker in class, or are you good at managing your time such that you could handle both.

The resume format may be considered stale and dated, but from a hiring perspective I can tell you that it the best way to try and make impartial comparisons of people in regards to work experience, education, and other factors. This format is highly devoid of content that I could use to make a decision about your applicability for a job, which is not a good idea for a resume.

</comment><comment><USER4> While I understand the "creative" aspects of designing a resume like this, I find that they end up giving me a headache. Firstly, because the overuse of colour. And secondly, because I'm not sure where to get the information I want to get.

In the end, I end up being more frustrated with resumes like this. I think using certain bits (like the pie charts) in a regular resume would yield better results in terms of usability.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't want to see a tag cloud on your blog, much less your resume.

Actually, I don't want to see a tag cloud on your resume in particular. On your blog, it shows the jumble of stuff you write about. But your resume should not look like a haphazard jumble - it should be customized and laser focused to get a particular job.

<comment><USER6> The tag cloud is understandable: one of his interests is "Cloud" after all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought it was a neat concept. If he were actually sending this to an employer, it would need some refining to properly target the intended job opening.

But dont worry Ajai, just wait a day or two and everyone else will start copying you.

I think you should look into making a program that can generate this type of resume, I'm sure Visual CV or another company would show some interest in acquiring that kind of work.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd think I'd leave off the desired career chart. A little too honest for most employers.

<comment><USER9> I don't know. It tells that he has a sense of individualism and confidence. Even if you can't keep him for a long time, an employer might still be able to benefit from such a personality. Also, honesty is a pretty bold statement to make.

<comment><USER10> He should also do it to disqualify _others_. I'm sure some will like it and some won't.

If he does it, hopefully his bold statement reflects the real him — it's not just an experiment. It's a great strategy when executed well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't understand it. There are some "factoids" floating around, and many gauges and pie charts and diagrams. But nowhere it is explained what does they mean. Pie chart with HTML part, what does it tell about your HTML skills? That they are roughly one third of something, while C is one tenth? Of what? That big diagram in upper left corner, it's in hours every month?

I really don't like when vague feelings and rough estimates are presented like they are serious comparable measuers. I don't think this resume is an appropriate way to present information that a resume is expected to present.

</comment><comment><USER12> Cute, but hokey.

I think the Pie chart section is actually fairly informative, a rare feat for pie charts.

</comment><comment><USER13> No whitespace. Gimmicky fake post-its. Random design elements. Strange charts and graphs. Clutter. My eyes are burning.

(And some of the charts, eg. the pie chart, make absolutely no sense.)

</comment><comment><USER14> I generally agree with the negative feedback here. The idea can potentially work, but not as it is done right now. Also, Java is not an acronym. While those pie-charts are effective at introducing keywords, they say nothing about what you can actually do with these technologies. What does a small sliver for "C" mean? Or even, what does a large sliver for RoR mean?

It's just very messy also. What would you think if someone sent in one of these?

</comment><comment><USER15> This is an interesting idea that might work nicely as a supplement to a normal resume and coverletter.

In terms of design quality, this execution seems a bit amateurish due to all the colors and typography.

The gold standard for personal information graphics is Nicholas Felton who publishes an annual report of his life at <http://feltron.com>

</comment><comment><USER16> Creativity: 10

Content: 4

If you could find a way to answer the reader's questions immediately using your presentation, you'd have a great resume.

As it stands, it's not easy to find out what I want to know. But one thing's for sure: you will not be easily forgotten.

<comment><USER17> I think he'd be best served to put this as a cover sheet atop a traditional resume. Certain people would love this; anyone who prefers a traditional presentation could just turn the page.

<comment><USER18> Don't forget to write a _real_ cover letter!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> well, I got to say that I like your idea. It explores the other possibilities of representing self and own achievements, as well personal attitudes and interests. I am not sure if this is the right form, it is not mine to judge, but you are on to something. The CV/resume needs a significant change and should be rethought of. It needs to be highly personalized, but yet to have a somewhat standardized form.

I see that your interests are in UI and you found out the perfect one that has not been altered in almost a century. All kudos for initiating the focus on this topic. Just remember that people really do not want to figure out your resume. They just want to quickly compare (main purpose of CVs/resumes), and if that quickly isn't there, you might only end up quickly in the trash unfortunately.

However, I am also thinking of how to re-implement the CV/resume so that it reflects the creative capabilities of people on www.aleveo.com. In this case, I want it dynamic and involving ideas and public ratings. Currently I am playing with timelines and weighted image scaling for ideas to reach a functional form.

If you are interested drop in the idea of visual resume on aleveo.com?

Anyway I encourage you to explore it further, finding balance between written and visual form.

Cheers!

</comment><comment><USER20> Frankly, hiring managers and recruiters have little time to decipher the resume. Standard formats improve the speed of cognitive processing. Even if you're the candidate of their dreams, they'll curse you for making them spend more time understanding that. And "remembering the candidate" is not necessarily a good thing: I still remember the resume from 1999 whose objective read: "Want to become the expert in Peoplesoft in 5 years", but not for flattering reasons, of course.

</comment><comment><USER21> In writing a resume, you want to put your strongest points first. What I see is too cluttered. I see how you spent your time all over the place but time doesn't always equivocate with something amazing, a blockbuster on your resume. An example could be the a business course you took on entrepreneurship that was three hours a week but made the most significant impact on you in college and a discussion point you want an interviewer to bring up.

</comment><comment><USER22> Immoderately cluttered and labyrinthine to mensurate.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think this resume stands out perfectly for the type of job he's trying to land. Sure this resume falls flat for a company looking for specific skills but I think this is more geared towards a company and position where they aren't sure what they want until they see it.

I'd definitely spend the time to figure the whole thing out if I got a resume like this on my desk.

</comment><comment><USER24> I love the concept, but...

I dislike the big chart on the top left. It's difficult to read and there's the disorganized star array underneath that gives me a headache. (Not to mention the content, are you applying to grad school?)

(The tag cloud is contrived right? (ie not from any data))

The "Skills" section is by far the most inspiring.

<comment><USER25> The skills section is where my focus when immediately but I'm thrown off by the groupings. How are InDesign and Dreamweaver in the same category? How is HTML next too C and Ruby? Why even mention these skills if you look at the right columns and see he has almost no interest in coding?

<comment><USER24> _Why even mention these skills if you look at the right columns and see he has almost no interest in coding?_

Great point.

In my comment I was suggesting that the idea was inspiring to personally reuse or suggest :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It is the same concept posted in Deviantart. The image was posted in 2007

[http://dizzia.deviantart.com/art/Curriculum-Vitae- PDF-690509...](http://dizzia.deviantart.com/art/Curriculum-Vitae-PDF-69050981)

The idea of a "visual resume" is really good especially if you are targeting a data visualization job

</comment><comment><USER27> While this isn't exactly related to your Visual Resume, it seems the majority of your interests lay within the business/entrepreneurial realm, however you are a Computer Science major. Having coding as the lowest of your desired careers, yet majoring in CS is a bit confounding to say the least...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks to everyone for the critique. It sure helps me in the direction I want to go towards improving this. As for some of the comments, I do plan to have this with a traditional resume so that those who are not interested can go to what they are comfortable.

</comment><comment><USER28> If Edward Tufte were dead, he'd be rolling in his grave. The only thing I learned about the author here is his lack of taste.

<comment><USER16> 1\. Why would Edward Tufte be rolling in his grave? Back up your hypotheses with a little data please.

2\. Stepwise refinement is an acceptable development process, even here on hn. What you perceive as "lack of taste", I see as one of the steps.

3\. OP is obviously experimenting, seeking feedback, and deploying it. Your feedback adds little. After spending so much time with boring corporate drones, I _love_ posts like this where someone actually has the balls to push the envelope. Cut him a break.

4\. If you only learn one thing about _anything_ , I suggest you go back a try to learn something else. Enquiring hackers want to know.

<comment><USER29> On the Tufte note: for example, the pie charts are askew in some 3D angle, distorting the proportions of the slices. This looks cool but is uninformative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> this reminded me of nicholas felton's annual reports:

<http://feltron.com/index.php></comment>


Ask HN: Is anyone using the Ceylon programming language? - <AUTHOR> This language seems to tick a bunch of boxes for languages that are often discussed on HN:
- Runs on the JVM (like Kotlin, Clojure)
- And has a more advanced type system than Java (like Scala)
- Backed by a large software company: Redhat (like Go, Rust)
- In active development (v1.3.1 released in November)
It has an IDE (plugin) too. But no-one ever seems to mention this language - not even in threads where non-mainstream languages are being discussed.
So, is anyone using Ceylon? Or have you tried it out? What has been your experience?
https://ceylon-lang.org/ <comment><USER2> I like Ceylon a lot, and I think the creator has done an awesome job taking community feedback and integrating it into his vision. It's one of the few languages I'd be happy to work in day in and day out.

It doesn't really compete with Kotlin with being a barely better java. I don't think Kotlin really adds all that much compared to Java but it's stupid simple to learn so I can see some teams transitioning to it.

Scala on the other hand is not easy to learn, but very powerful and can be written as a fully functional language. It's awesome, it has some warts, but at this point it has so much momentum that people who want type system power + FP on the JVM are going to choose Scala. It has the libraries, it has a plethora of big companies using it, and it has plenty of jobs (check the HN hiring posts even).

Ceylon definitely improves a bit on Scala, but maybe not enough. That being said, I like seeing other 'powerful' languages thrive, so hopefully it will pick up a bit more adoption. Alternatively, Gavin and the team will just decide to help out the scala compiler development ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you used the IDE at all? One of the things I liked about Ceylon is that they seem to think that having a good IDE is as important as having a good language - something I agree with. They're shipping plugins for IntelliJ and Eclipse, where a lot of other languages start off with an Emacs package, but don't go for the full IDE experience. Clojure would be an example of that, I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like the name Ceylon...simply because of my nationality. I am going to follow this thread just to see what kind responds we will be getting here.

<comment><AUTHOR> I also like the name :)

Unfortunately, without some upvotes from others I imagine this thread will be lost in the deluge of submissions :(</comment></comment>


Netflix to raise $2B in debt to fund more original content - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/22/netflix-to-raise-2-billion-in-debt-to-fund-more-original-content/ <comment><USER2> When you are sitting on nearly 1B a year in cold hard cash profit, I guess suddenly it becomes very efficient to just make the content yourself rather than pay a middleman in Hollywood!

I wonder, are most studios and writers "on the NFLX books", or do they work for small external studios? This would impact NFLX's costs and IP rights in interesting ways if they are keeping it off the books.

Methinks they have enough money and power to maintain complete ownership. Amazon does the opposite-- delivery drivers and factory workers are usually employed by faceless contracting firms like "AFS Delivery Inc" of etc</comment>


A guide to Minimalist Web Design - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/picsrush/a-guide-to-minimalist-web-design-9c14503eeec4 <comment><USER2> I normally don't comment on "guides/how" design posts as I know there are a lot of caveats and personal opinions involved (not the least my own).

However I don't think this post is about minimalist web-design as such. I say so because if you want to learn to do minimalist web design this isn't a useful guide (I am aware it's not mean to be a tutorial but it does offer some observations that can lead you the wrong way)

The number one thing you need to understand as a designer if you want to do minimalist design is typography and to do so properly takes years. It's a very refined art to do well and most people get it wrong when they try.

Putting few things on a screen is not minimalism and the Google screen is in itself not an example of minimalism. It was never really a conscious effort but rather a "lets remove everything and just add the search bar and a logo".

What google screen however is a good example of is first principles. I.e. going from the categories based search engines of it's time to a purely search focused approach and using pageranking rather than humans to determine results.

If you want to understand and do minimalist design learn typography first. Besides practicing a lot, a great book to do so with(a classic) is "Elements of Typographic Style" by Robert Bringhurst. It wont teach you typography on the web but it will teach you about typography which is one of the keys to understanding minimalism on the web. Would also recommend Grid Systems by Josef Muller Brockman which also provide a good foundation for understanding typography.

What google screen however is a good example of is first principles. I.e. going from the categories based search engines of it's time to a purely search focused approach and using pageranking rather than humans to determine results.

Just my five cents.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for that helpful comment, I was excited to read it. It is different from I think, sure I respect it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How about a guide to non-minimalist web design? Can we please please please have a discussion about how to build interfaces that aren't oceans of white space, relentless reduction of "click targets", and an overriding emphasis on showing the user the absolute least amount of information possible lest we frighten or confuse them?

I'm so sick of consumer-focused web design infecting all corners of web design, including and especially professional/industry design where more information may sometimes be better than less. It's like UI designers' collective takeaway from Tufte et al. is "wow showing lots of information effectively in limited space is tough, let's just not do that."

<comment><USER4> I'm glad you said that.

I've gone back to making a _home page_ (remember those?) for my Maths teaching next year. I'm trying to pack as much as I can into one page that students can just access without passwords and which will work ok on a variety of platforms.

[http://www.maths91.uk/](http://www.maths91.uk/)

I suppose this is 'maximalist'. Still no javascript. The style sheet is copypasta from various sources I'm afraid.

<comment><USER5> I love that page, information dense but with a clear hierarchy and progression.

<comment><USER4> The page is a rendition of an administrative document (the 'scheme of work' for the Maths course) into language appropriate to students. The idea is they can't lose it if it is at a handy location on the web. We'll see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What always is missing from these Minimalist Design articles, are examples of heavily trafficked social sites. Tons of content, presented in a clean way. HN is a good example I think. Showing off sites that are nothing but basically a white page, with a single professional product image in the center, isn't really moving things forward. Yes it's minimal, but it's easy, and basic.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you for the comment, it is a good remarque.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ironically, the article has a picture that reads in giant letters: "Does this thing adds value to my Design"? -- and there's a superfluous yellow circle behind the text, just for decoration.

If the author feels that image adds value to the blog post, I'm not sure I want his advice on minimalism.

<comment><AUTHOR> i appreciate that, I admit that I had the same thought before about if the image adds value to the blog post, and I keep it because I think the yellow circle represent the heaviness of that question and adds more focus. thank you

<comment><USER7> Thanks for taking the criticism seriously.

You know, my comment was too harshly worded. It had a mean tone that was not my intention. I hate it when people give snarky criticism online, and then I go and do it myself... Sorry about that.

<comment><AUTHOR> please don't say that because I accept it. It is my first publication, I want to learn more from that comment. thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like to treat design like writing. Pour all thoughts onto a page > organize thoughts > write the piece > edit > edit > edit. Every edit phase usually centers on condensing and removing fluff. In my experience, it's the same with design... likely because I'm an amateur. I have to overdesign something before I can start stripping away the unnecessary stuff. If I try to design something 'minimalist' from the start, I'm stifled.

To paraphrase the author, you don't add white space as much as you throw stuff out.

Aside: If I experienced any of the last five branding examples in the wild, I doubt I'd remember them. In these cases, minimalism = milquetoast design.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you for the comment, I think I share with you the same feeling about "If I try to design something 'minimalist' from the start, I'm stifled.". -About the Aside, I think they just don't offer a big service that you can meet everyday, like google or apple, but they are good exemple of "doing" minimalism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > In web design it is quite the same, it is about keeping only the most > essential elements that let users quickly and easily solve their problems.

Is the dickbar really essential to solving my problems? Maybe think about removing it?

<comment><AUTHOR> of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's minimalist web design and then there's pretentious and _gaudy by nature_ websites filled with glossy pictures stacked in nice and shiny grids in the name of minimalism. I often see the latter being peddled around as minimalism including some examples in the linked post.

</comment><comment><USER11> for the OP, since it looks like you're also the author:

there's a typo/grammar mistake in the image "Does this thing adds value to my Design?"

'add' not 'adds' and in English we wouldn't normally capitalise the d in design in this sentence

(intended as helpful tip, not criticism!)

<comment><USER12> There are enough typos and Engrish construction that it really should be run through something like Paperrater.com. Not that such services will catch everything or have all the correct answers, but if your writing is bad enough, making changes until they stop finding errors is a good practice</comment></comment>


Dutch report: Buk missile downed MH17 in Ukraine - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/10/13/a-dutch-report-will-say-what-downed-mh17-it-wont-blame-the-russians/?tid=sm_tw <comment><USER2> Here's the full report, for those who wish to read it.

[http://cdn.onderzoeksraad.nl/documents/report-mh17-crash- en....](http://cdn.onderzoeksraad.nl/documents/report-mh17-crash-en.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> > In July, Russia vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that > would have established an international criminal tribunal to investigate the > MH17 attack.

Nothing to hide, right?

<comment><USER4> The US doesn't recognizes the ICC either. Countries do not like to surrender sovereignty to international bodies, the ICC only works when you have a big enough military to pluck your indited targets by force.

If push comes to shove I can't see any nation openly surrender any of their citizens to an international court which is why while the ICC is a great idea in general it's more or less a sham.

It's easy to prosecute people from the Balkans or Africa when you have the US or NATO forces doing the dirty work for you, it gets some what harder when you have to deal with nations that have actual power.

<comment><USER5> This was not about ICC, this was to set up a specific tribunal to investigate this particular crime.

A more relevant comparison might be the Lockerbie trial?

<comment><USER4> It was most likely the ICC, the UNSC is the only body that can instruct the ICC to start a tribunal and that's the role that the ICC plays for in the whole UN eco-system opening a completely separate international criminal tribunal to would be a bit odd especially since it won't have any mandates and I'm not even sure if the UNSC can do that.

P.S. The Lockerbie trial wasn't an international tribunal, or an international trial it was awkwardly constructed due to the fact that neither the US nor the UK had a working extradition treaties with Libya and the case was not turned over to the ICC.

The trial was conducted in the Netherlands yes but under Scottish law and that's because the dutch did had an extradition treaty with Libya as well as some weird treaty with presumably either the UK, the commonwealth or even historically the Kingdom of Scotland which allowed them to establish a Scottish court on dutch grounds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So pretty much no change from what new organizations were originally saying at the time. This incident took place one month after my son was born and I remember having a tough time sleeping that night thinking about all of the people, particularly young children on the flight.

Before this I did not realize that the airline you choose is so important. Many airlines including British Airways which I usually use had been avoiding all of Ukraine airspace for months before this happened, however sadly they were in the minority.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm afraid, it was clear from the beginning. Only Russia told it was not true....

<comment><USER8> They change their tune so often it's hard to keep track. Have a look: [http://listverse.com/2015/09/07/10-outrageous-ways- russian-m...](http://listverse.com/2015/09/07/10-outrageous-ways-russian- media-covered-the-crash-of-mh17/)

<comment><USER9> Thats their strategy. They do not need proofs just spread confusion to prevent sane discussion.

<comment><USER10> Adam Curtis has a great piece about this - Vladislav Surkov and his "nonlinear warfare" \- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcy8uLjRHPM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcy8uLjRHPM)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting reaction many are having,

I think its pretty clear on the world stage that Russia had involvement in this, either it was supplying the weapons or worse case is was Russia's 'Moderate rebels' that did it. Which seem to be how first world powers these days get what they want without putting their name on it

The fact Russia Vetoed a UN investigation and Putin has stated a few times when asked that it would be a waste of time to do an investigation sends a clear and strong message.

The interesting thing to me, is why it has come out now? the US propaganda machine is in over drive lately. US has spent years funneling 'moderate' rebels towards Syria, while using ISIS as the poster kids for more draconian surveillance and not really doing anything about them.

I mean its pretty clear right? US(cia) created the environment that allowed ISIS to grow and then used them to push forward their international agenda (removal of Assad (before that Iraq/Afghanistan destabilization ready for a US friendly government to be installed)) and domestic agenda (removal of rights for the 'greater' good).

Just this week we have the US stating they are stopping training 'moderate' rebels (I quote as I do not believe there are ever moderate rebels) but then proceeds to sell Saudi Arabia missiles that TODAY Saudi Arabia have given to the 'moderate' Rebels.

We see. Luckily we live in interested times, and the internet has made it so we can see more of the world stage without local filtering (newspapers/local new) interesting times indeed.

TL:DR: Russia's moderate rebels most likely shot the plan down, Russia knows this stalls investigation. Then a bit of a rant of, Why this has come out now

<comment><USER12> It has come out now because the Dutch Safety Board gave itself a year to write its report. The release date was already announced six weeks ago in Dutch media: [http://nos.nl/artikel/2054305-eindrapport-mh17-13-oktober- ge...](http://nos.nl/artikel/2054305-eindrapport-mh17-13-oktober- gepubliceerd.html)

Neither the US nor ISIS had anything to do with this report or its timing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10380018](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10380018)

</comment><comment><USER14> Always interesting reading the same news from different sources - the BBC story does not seem to mention the Almaz-Antey test firing of a newer model of the missile to disprove Russian involvement.

Where does the WP lie on the political Spectrum? As a Euro-bloke I don't know.

<comment><USER15> There's a section of the report which answers the Russian claims.

<comment><USER16> Yes, see here:

[http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34511973](http://www.bbc.com/news/world- europe-34511973)

The BBC isn't anywhere on the "political spectrum". If the OP was implying that the BBC was deliberately not including that info for political reasons, he/she doesn't really know anything about the BBC.

<comment><USER17> The BBC is generally accepted to have a left-wing bias, but I doubt if that would have come into play in this particular story.

<comment><USER12> "Left-wing bias" is an accusation devoid of content. It is only practiced by those who can make no better argument, or are unwilling/unable to entertain a different viewpoint.

Good journalistic practice prescribes a neutral tone and a willingness to report on all sides. In general, the right wing is more unwilling to hear opposing views than the left wing, so good journalistic practice itself is more left than right.

I'll take self-proclaimed neutral left-wing reporting over the right-wing equivalent any day, thank you.

<comment><USER17> >> In general, the right wing is more unwilling to hear opposing views than the left wing, so good journalistic practice itself is more left than right.

That's merely your assertion.

If you look at the BBC's reporting on items such as the refugee crisis, the EU, Global Warming, the economy, etc it all pretty much lines up with what The Guardian promotes.

<comment><USER12> Actually, it is more than an assertion. It has a premise, an assertion, and a deduction, each of which can be supported or refuted. You apparently chose neither, as if my statement carries less weight than yours, and your disparaging remark is enough to change my opinion.

Why do you think my post is worth less than yours? Perhaps you are more unwilling than me to hear opposing views?

<comment><USER17> I'm perfectly happy to hear opposing views. And I don't think your post is worth less than mine. I just don't agree with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Some problems with the report is that it was written by Dutch and Ukrainian people, which might not be totally objective. Additionally, large parts of the report isn't open for everyone to see. I think it's strange to accept a conclusion without being able to see everything that caused the researches to come to their conclusion. Finally, when the report was revealed the press wasn't allowed to ask any questions.

<comment><USER19> > Some problems with the report is that it was written by Dutch and Ukrainian > people, which might not be totally objective.

Which is why the report includes both "factual information" and "analysis" sections. Feel free to contest specific points in their analysis you object to.

> Finally, when the report was revealed the press wasn't allowed to ask any > questions.

Probably because 99% of the questions they'd ask would be answered by reading the report. It's not like the reporters can't read it and email their questions in a few hours later.</comment></comment>


Show HN: AudioBot - a web crawler for electronic music (weekend project). - <AUTHOR> http://audio-bot.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I saw a couple of music scrapers/crawlers on HN today, so I thought I would share mine!</comment>


Just How Important is the Valley?  Let's Look at some Data. - <AUTHOR> http://www.tonywright.com/2009/just-how-important-is-the-valley-lets-look-at-some-data/

<comment><USER3> Very interesting...

>> "I took some public lists of technology acquisitions in 2007 and 2008"

Not all startups are after the 'Acquisition' event either. I'd say if anything that would bias results in favor of the Valley. I don't know how you can really get a handle on the millions of 'startups' that just make money reasonably quietly.

Communities like HN, IRC channels, etc make me wonder more what the Valley has to offer. There's a whole array of cool online communities, and if you build something cool, people will start to contact you. I think face to face contact is needed less and less these days, unless you're trying to raise money.

<comment><USER4> I agree in some respects, but there definitely are still some real advantages to being in the Valley.

I've been doing a lot of work towards monetizing justin.tv lately, especially with video ads. These products tend to be very ad-hoc, and are usually quite poorly documented. Sometimes we've tried to get an integration working by having me try to follow the docs, and call/email when things don't work properly. It usually works out in the end, but it's frustrating and takes too long (sometimes several days of back-and-forth).

To contrast, with the ad companies that are in the Bay Area, we just ask them to send a developer to our office. Both of us sit on my couch, while I do the integration and make bad jokes about the quality of their documentation. We usually get it done in an hour or so this way.

<comment><USER5> I think it depends on how integrated vs. modular the business is.

Disruptive business ideas usually require many deals between different parties - there's the business integration, and the technical integration that you mention (as video ads become more common, technical and business standards will probably emerge, making it modular).

But some business ideas are more modular, in that customers can just slot the produce/service into an existing business role, and into an existing socket in their system. They are plug-compatible, in both senses.

This plug-compatibility also applies to partners. If you need to interact with content providers and hardware manufacturers (e.g. as Apple needed for the iPod and iTunes), some kind of Pond is essential, not just for access to those parties, but also access to helpers of the connection (e.g. lawyers who understand the issues in these kinds of deals). I think this is probably true whether you have a novel disruptive business, or just an ordinary one: if you need to make deals, a Pond makes things much easier.

But if you can modularize (systematize) your interactions with your "partners" to such an extent that they become "customers", you don't need to be in the same pond. An example is the "partners" of Google Adwords - there's a standard interface that people use all over the world, and it works well even though there's no customer service.

New ideas tend to not be modular - standardization comes later - so a Pond there.

<comment><USER6> It's true that some businesses are more nimble than others, but Bill is still right: the ability to sit on the couch here is a more efficient integration mechanism than any other. You're far more likely to complete a deal when the technical work can be done extremely quickly.

I've worked at startups in Seattle and San Francisco now, and in my experience, the startups here are faster. At the risk of sounding like a cliche, it's just something in the air here. Things are always on fire.

Is it worth the cost of living? I don't know. But there's definitely a difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This post is a result of this thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=563810>

I did a bit more digging. As the previous commentors pointed out, the data is not perfect and I'd be careful about drawing any conclusions about it. But, I thought it was interesting nonetheless.

<comment><USER7> Regardless of whether the data is "perfect", I haven't seen anything more than anecdote supporting the SV hypothesis. Great article!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I posted a reply here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=567497>

</comment><comment><USER9> I thought this data was interesting, and I used it as an excuse to play around with some data analysis / visualization tools that I've been exploring lately, Many Eyes and DabbleDB.

I wrote a quick blog entry discussing how I used them to perform some further analysis on the data:

Visualizing and sharing data ( <http://daniel.yipyip.com/77049.html> )

<comment><USER10> One of the interesting things here was this graph (when you change it to $ per state); [http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/wikified/acquired_startup...](http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/wikified/acquired_startups/GroupedByUSAState:USStateMap)

Texas brought in almost as much money as CA in acquisitions in this snapshot of data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> While this blog post certainly rings pleasantly in my ear (based in ATX), I think there's more to being in the valley than simply the success rate of a startup. I'm very envious of the enthusiastic community and people you meet in the area, whether you're at the bar, having a cup of coffee, etc. However, I'm not envious of the cost of doing business and basic living.

RE: 2008 stats, I think it's a reasonable assumption that the economic downturn is certainly being felt first by the east and west (capital capitols) before it hits other tech satellites like Austin, Boulder, etc. It will be interesting to see who bounces back first and at what velocity... Compared to Web 1.0 => Web 2.0, things could be drastically different this time around given the market's significant retraction, and displacement of VCs in web startups.

One thing about business here, we haven't had the luxury of big VCs so most startups here have a different challenge that generally results in a profitable web business, not big exits.

</comment><comment><USER12> _The Valley offers no edge here– in fact, some people wonder if the "echo chamber" doesn't actually get in the way of understanding the rest of the world._

This was my experience at Startup School last year. I regularly run into business owners who need all kinds of technology, but no one I ran into at the meetups knew anything about it.

If another person had pitched me his flash card app, I would have jumped out the window (except no building had more than 2 stories).

<comment><USER13> Damn you for harshing on my flash card app for small business owners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Without harshing on your data (esp the denominators of population size as you remark), you do show that it's far from absolutely necessary to be in the Valley.

But to put it in perspective: in _Valley_ vs. _World_ , it's doing disproportionately well.

</comment><comment><USER14> This data isn't of much use for analysis without all the startups that failed or didn't get acquired. This is like trying to analyze average height by nationality using a sample consisting of professional basketball players for each country.

<comment><USER15> Actually, I think it might be a bit better than that. The question is - <USER2> biases are there to acquisition with regards to location? Let's say you are more likely to be acquired if your are successful (surely we can all agree on that). If SV is the navel of the world, then you would expect startups in SV to have a _higher_ chance of being acquired, than say a startup in Philadelphia.

Now the question is - is being acquired a good trace marker for a not- particularly successful startup? The answer is it doesn't matter - because the original PG essay was talking about being a major economic driver, so in some ways it is irrelevant what the non-successful startups are doing.

What it comes down is, is acquisition a fair sampler of successful startups. I don't know the answer to that, but I think a fair number of people would be surprised if it was "Hell, no".

Back to the sporting analogy, it is like trying to figure out the fastest nationality by looking at their 100m record. If each country trains and sends to the Olympics its fastest people then yes - but you have no simple way of knowing whether that is true. However you may draw some conclusions about who the fastest race is, on the basis that you would expect any bias to work against them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> correlation does not imply causation

<comment><USER17> Why do people routinely make this cliche comment, thinking its going to give them genius points, when it only kills their karma?

<comment><USER18> Well vaksel has more karma than most small countries, so I don't think that was a consideration for him. :-)</comment></comment></comment>


Authors at Google: Robert Reich - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIxXZa5Fwzc

<comment><AUTHOR> His closing quote:

 _My argument to the richest members of society is, "You will do better with a smaller share of a rapidly growing economy in which people feel comfortable, they're not angry, they won't resort [to] and support demogogues then you will having a larger share of an economy that's almost dead in the water and a politics that's getting steadily angrier and meaner."_</comment>


Why California Is Such a Talent Magnet - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2016/01/why-california-is-such-a-talent-magnet <comment><USER2> > It focuses primarily on redeveloping 35 downtown blocks into a vibrant > working and living space that can be used by entrepreneurs and creatives

Or in a word: Gentrification...

If it isn't what they're trying to do then someone explain to me what it is they're trying to do. Because it sounds to me like they're trying to change 35 downtown blocks from whatever they're now (presumably mixed class housing) into something specifically designed for affluent young professionals.</comment>